Download or read book A Voluptuous God written by Robert V. Thompson and published by Wood Lake Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Voluptuous' may not be a common word associated with God, but the author speaks metaphorically of God in a way that calls us to laughter, love, and joy -- voluptuousness as 'full delight' -- and invites us to worship a God of intimacy rather than a God of distance. The light yet not trivial tone of this work supports the author's basic premise that we are meant to live our humanity joyfully, thankfully, and fully from our hearts. The book is rooted in the Christian tradition but affirms that truth can also be found in other religions, spirituality, and secular practices.

Download or read book Church History for Modern Ministry written by Dayton Hartman and published by Lexham Press. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With all the pressing demands of modern ministry, why make time to learn church history? Is it relevant to worship and ministry today? Pastor Dayton Hartman argues that church history is not old news, but a vital component of a healthy ministry. In Church History for Modern Ministry, Hartman explores the importance of church history and shows how an understanding of our past can help us address contemporary issues. The faithfulness, discipleship, and perseverance of the early church can help today's church stand firm in times of change. "Hartman gives us an enjoyable, readable, and trustworthy book in Church History for Modern Ministry that helps us see the theological and ministerial value of studying our history. If you're a pastor, you need to know church history--not just for doctrinal clarity and sermon illustrations, but also for your own spiritual nourishment. I will be pointing pastors and aspiring pastors to this book for years to come." --Tony Merida, founding pastor, Imago Dei Church, Raleigh, NC For many evangelicals, church history jumps from the book of Acts, has a brief stopover in the Protestant Reformation, and picks up in the present day. In Church History for Modern Ministry, Hartman corrects our dangerous a-historical view by mining the rich history of our faith. I'll be recommending this to pastors and parishioners alike. It's a great way for them to meet the family they never knew they had! --Drew Dyck, managing editor, Leadership Journal; author, Yawning at Tigers: You Can't Tame God, So Stop Trying It seems to me that 95 percent of the stupid things we do as pastors could be avoided if we knew a little church history. I am very happy that Dayton Hartman has written this book. As both a practicing pastor and a practicing church historian, he is well poised to bring the insights of our forefathers to bear on the day-to-day issues that confront church leaders. That Church History for Modern Ministry is both short and snarky is an added bonus! --Mike McKinley, author; contributor and speaker, 9Marks; senior pastor, Sterling Park Baptist Church (Sterling, VA) In this helpful book Hartman shows pastors why we should appreciate church history. Every generation of Christians and pastors stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before. The lessons that God taught our forebears can be very useful for ministry today. Hartman helps us see how this is so, and also provides practical suggestions for introducing historical insights into congregational life. I recommend this book for pastors as well as other church leaders. --Tom Ascol, PhD; executive director, Founders Ministries Christians in America today--especially evangelicals--suffer from a damaging lack of connection to the 'cloud of witnesses' who have preceded us in Christian history. I am happy to commend Dr. Dayton Hartman's readable introduction to church history for pastors, who will surely be the key players in teaching Christians about the riches of the church's past. --Thomas S. Kidd, PhD; professor of history, Baylor University Over the past decade, I have taught church history to over a thousand seminarians and college students. Many of them have raised questions about whether or not church history is really useful for pastors and other ministers. While I make regular pastoral application in the classroom, I have yet to find a good book to point students to that weds church history and practical ministry. I'm grateful that pastor-historian Dayton Hartman has written this book--it fills an important gap and answers many of the questions my students are asking. I hopeChurch History for Modern Ministry is widely read and leads more pastors and other ministry leaders to mine the depths of Christian history for contemporary spiritual flourishing. --Nathan Finn, PhD; dean of the School of Theology and Missions, Union University All pastors and Christian teachers can greatly benefit from a solid knowledge of church history. And the best place to start is with Dayton Hartman's book Church History for Modern Ministry. This helpful book presents the key content of church history in a clear, concise, and careful manner. Yet the book is also distinct in reflecting careful theological ideas in a readable and sometimes humorous way. I endorse this book and its author to all readers. --Kenneth R. Samples, senior research scholar, Reasons to Believe Church History for Modern Ministry is a lighthearted yet serious look into the value of Christian history for contemporary ministry. Knowing the past helps ministers respond to future events with practical wisdom and theological depth. Hartman frames historical and theological developments with the expertise of a historian and the disposition of a pastor while introducing us to saints of old along the way. --Walter Strickland II, special advisor to the president for diversity, instructor of theology, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Cloaked in skinny jeans, coiffed with a faux-hawk and possessed by a sense of humor and engaging style, Dayton Hartman invites his tribe (pastors) to visit the foreign country that is the church's past. An able guide, Hartman gives an introductory tour that will surely inspire his group to visit again and again and to appreciate, value, and dialogue with church history as they press on to lead the people of God today. --Edward L. Smither, PhD; dean of the College of Intercultural Studies, Columbia International University; author of Augustine as Mentor This book is like most of my favorite books: short, enjoyable, and surprisingly practical! Hartman has provided an easy-to-read primer on the need and relevance of church history for our modern-day ministry. This book is anything but dry, and Hartman writes in a way that is relatable, refreshingly accessible, and immediately helpful. I was challenged by my own distance from the church of the past and encouraged to close that gap as a result of this work. Read it, enjoy it, and put these exhortations to use for the glory of God and the good of His church! --Brian Davis, hip-hop artist (God's Servant), Lamp Mode Recordings; pastor/church planter, Risen Christ Fellowship (Philadelphia, PA)

Download or read book Now That I m a Christian written by C. Michael Patton and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we help our friends who have just become Christians or are young in the faith? In this concise and accessible book, Mike Patton unpacks the basics of the Christian faith, helping new believers think rightly about God and live fully for God as they begin their new life in Christ. In ten easy-to-read chapters, Patton introduces readers to the foundational teachings and life-giving practices of Christianity—from the doctrine of the Trinity to reading and understanding the Bible. Designed for individual use or small group discussion, this handbook on the Christian faith has the potential to become the go-to guide for new believers wanting to follow Jesus with their heads and their hands.

Download or read book Heretics written by Jonathan Wright and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively examination of the heretics who helped Christianity become the world’s most powerful religion. From Arius, a fourth-century Libyan cleric who doubted the very divinity of Christ, to more successful heretics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, this book charts the history of dissent in the Christian Church. As the author traces the Church’s attempts at enforcing orthodoxy, from the days of Constantine to the modern Catholic Church’s lingering conflicts, he argues that heresy—by forcing the Church to continually refine and impose its beliefs—actually helped Christianity to blossom into one of the world’s most formidable religions. Today, all believers owe it to themselves to grapple with the questions raised by heresy. Can you be a Christian without denouncing heretics? Is it possible that new ideas challenging Church doctrine are destined to become as popular as Luther’s once-outrageous suggestions of clerical marriage and a priesthood of all believers? A delightfully readable and deeply learned new history, Heretics overturns our assumptions about the role of heresy in a faith that still shapes the world. “Wright emphasizes the ‘extraordinarily creative role’ that heresy has played in the evolution of Christianity by helping to ‘define, enliven, and complicate’ it in dialectical fashion. Among the world’s great religions, Christianity has been uniquely rich in dissent, Wright argues—especially in its early days, when there was so little agreement among its adherents that one critic compared them to a marsh full of frogs croaking in discord.” —The New Yorker

Download or read book Heroes and Heretics written by Insight for Living and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With growing popular interest because of television, movies, and books, unbelieving historians are teaching that the early church was filled with "lost scriptures", "church conspiracies," and even radical changes to the Bible itself. Most Christians have no idea how to respond to the questions they raise. This unique resource gives you a crash course on the most important people, events, and ideas of the earliest Christians following the New Testament period. In its pages, you'll discover what every believer should know about the early church ... and why.

Download or read book Know the Heretics written by Justin S. Holcomb and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a lot of talk about heresy these days. The frequency and volume of accusations suggest that some Christians have lost a sense of the gravity of the word. On the other hand, many believers have little to no familiarity with orthodox doctrine or the historic distortions of it. What’s needed is a strong dose of humility and restraint, and also a clear and informed definition of orthodoxy and heresy. Know the Heretics provides an accessible “travel guide” to the most significant heresies throughout Christian history. As a part of the KNOW series, it is designed for personal study or classroom use, but also for small groups and Sunday schools wanting to more deeply understand the foundations of the faith. Each chapter covers a key statement of faith and includes a discussion of its historical context; a simple explanation of the unorthodox teaching, the orthodox response and a key defender; reflections of contemporary relevance; and discussion questions.

Download or read book Heretics And Heresies written by Robert Green Ingersoll and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's an intriguing book that describes the pitfalls of a religious-dictated country. Robert Ingersoll was not a biblical scholar or theologian. He was interested in liberty and freedom of thought. In other words, he was a political advocate for civil rights who spoke about religion.

Download or read book God s Heretics written by Aubrey Burl and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides a vivid account of the way the Crusade and its legacy turned and twisted for over a hundred years. It focuses on the personalities on sides, their motivations and objectives, creating for the modern reader an overwhelming impression of the powerful beliefs that drove persecutor and victim.

Download or read book God Interrupted written by Benjamin Lazier and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-24 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Could the best thing about religion be the heresies it spawns? Leading intellectuals in interwar Europe thought so. They believed that they lived in a world made derelict by God's absence and the interruption of his call. In response, they helped resurrect gnosticism and pantheism, the two most potent challenges to the monotheistic tradition. In God Interrupted, Benjamin Lazier tracks the ensuing debates about the divine across confessions and disciplines. He also traces the surprising afterlives of these debates in postwar arguments about the environment, neoconservative politics, and heretical forms of Jewish identity. In lively, elegant prose, the book reorients the intellectual history of the era. God Interrupted also provides novel accounts of three German-Jewish thinkers whose ideas, seminal to fields typically regarded as wildly unrelated, had common origins in debates about heresy between the wars. Hans Jonas developed a philosophy of biology that inspired European Greens and bioethicists the world over. Leo Strauss became one of the most important and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of religion, radically recast what it means to be a Jew. Together they help us see how talk about God was adapted for talk about nature, politics, technology, and art. They alert us to the abiding salience of the divine to Europeans between the wars and beyond--even among those for whom God was long missing or dead.

Download or read book God s Heretics written by Aubrey Burl and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides a vivid account of the way the Crusade and its legacy turned and twisted for over a hundred years. It focuses on the personalities on sides, their motivations and objectives, creating for the modern reader an overwhelming impression of the powerful beliefs that drove persecutor and victim.

Download or read book A Survival Guide for Heretics written by Aaron Van Voorhis and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So many people are leaving the church today because of its hypocrisy, bigotry, and intellectual dishonesty. Such "heretics" find themselves in exile, wondering if there is anything worth holding onto regarding Christianity and faith. The answer is: Yes, but probably not in the way you think. A Survival Guide for Heretics reveals that the scandalous heart of Christianity is about the death of religion and the resurrection of a new way of living in the world called the kingdom of God. Drawing upon the fields of psychology, philosophy, and Radical Theology, this book guides readers step by step through their own spiritual journeys and reveals how they got where they're at and how to move forward. Along the way, Aaron Van Voorhis addresses some of the hardest questions perplexing Christians today and offers some surprising answers. As a pastor, Aaron uses his personal story and the story of his church as examples of how Christianity might be embodied in the twenty-first century. Deeply informed by the work of Peter Rollins and John D. Caputo, among others, A Survival Guide for Heretics is a very accessible and necessary book for anyone struggling with their faith.

Download or read book Heretics and Heresies written by Robert Green Ingersoll and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHOEVER has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak. This word was born of the hatred, arrogance and cruelty of those who love their enemies, and who, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. This word was born of intellectual slavery in the feudal ages of thought. It was an epithet used in the place of argument. From the commencement of the Christian era, every art has been exhausted and every conceivable punishment inflicted to force all people to hold the same religious opinions. This effort was born of the idea that a certain belief was necessary to the salvation of the soul. Christ taught, and the Church still teaches, that unbelief is the blackest of crimes. God is supposed to hate with an infinite and implacable hatred, every heretic upon the earth, and the heretics who have died are supposed at this moment to be suffering the agonies of the damned. The Church persecutes the living and her God burns the dead.

Download or read book Christians Hate Me written by Steve Shaw and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is not for the purpose to condemn Christianity, for they have done that for themselves already. I expose a truth that has been expressed by people of all walks of life including Christians themselves concerning the present day failures of Christianity. If God never fails then he is not supporting Christianity. Christianity is failing on so many fronts today, but why? This book also contains a hidden mystery that reveals Christ as never before and I call it the truth that sets you free from the bondage of sin and it obviously has not been preached. This book will help all people come to the knowledge that God is in all people and not exclusive to Christians or any other religious group. The first indication that God is in you is that you can think of him in your head right now. Imagine that.

Download or read book A Heretic s Guide to Eternity written by Spencer Burke and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2007-06-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguishing between religion and spirituality, Burke offers what he calls a new way of looking at God, one centered on the idea of grace. He emphasizes a God who is looking to save the world, not a God who seems more intent on condemning certain practices . . . . For Burke, God is to be questioned, not simply obeyed. His challenging thesis will appeal to many people today who have given up on organized religion but still seek some connection to spirituality.

Download or read book Heretics and Heresies From The Gods and Other Lectures written by Robert Green Ingersoll and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Handbook for Heretics written by John W. Sloat and published by CCB Publishing. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Handbook for Heretics discusses the differences between religion and the Kingdom of God. Many mainline churches resist the current reformation, a gradual movement away from traditional Christianity toward a vital spirituality. Its adherents are frequently labeled "heretics" when in fact they are actually the leading edge of a new spiritual age. They are discovering the "much more" which Jesus promised to tell us, such spiritual phenomena as out-of-body and near-death experiences, pre-birth and post-death appearances, angel communication, and "coincidental" experiences. A Handbook for Heretics reconsiders some traditional Christian doctrines so as to broaden the church's view of spiritual reality. About the Author: John W. Sloat, a former Presbyterian minister, served churches in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He holds a B.A. from Denison University, 1954; an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary, 1957; and a Th.M. from Pittsburgh Seminary, 1977. Previous books include Lord, Make Us One (non-fiction, 1986) and The Other Half (fiction, 2001). Several of his sermons have been included in Pulpit Digest, a national preaching journal. He is married to Helen Burdick Sloat, a psychiatric nurse, and they have three children and eight grandchildren. A pianist and organist, Sloat also plays the French horn, is a scratch model builder and leads spirituality groups.

Download or read book The Ultimate Heresy written by Rodger L. Cragun and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy Biblical? While theologians throughout church history have condemned numerous doctrines as heresy, Cragun boldly declares that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is the worst heresy that the church has ever faced, resulting in the undermining of central teachings of Jesus. Treating the Bible as the inerrant word of God often eclipses the very real dimensions of hermeneutics, that is, the who, how, and why of biblical interpretation and translation. After twenty-five years of detailed research in libraries based in six major universities and seminaries, Cragun has distilled his work in this book to challenge Christians who hold up inerrancy as a key tenant of the faith.